In ancient Greece, the rose was closely associated with the goddess Aphrodite.[1][2] In the Iliad, Aphrodite protects the body of Hector using the "immortal oil of the rose"[3][1] and the archaic Greek lyric poet Ibycus praises a beautiful youth saying that Aphrodite nursed him "among rose blossoms".[4][1] The second-century AD Greek travel writer Pausanias associates the rose with the story of Adonis and states that the rose is red because Aphrodite wounded herself on one of its thorns and stained the flower red with her blood.[5][1] Book Eleven of the ancient Roman novel The Golden Ass by Apuleius contains a scene in which the goddess Isis, who is identified with Venus, instructs the main character, Lucius, who has been transformed into a donkey, to eat rose petals from a crown of roses worn by a priest as part of a religious procession in order to regain his humanity.[2]

The cultivation of geometrical gardens, in which the rose has often held pride of place, has a long history in Iran and surrounding lands.[8][9] In the lyric ghazal, it is the beauty of the rose that provokes the longing song of the nightingale[10] - an image prominent, for example, in the poems of Hafez.[11]

In turn, the imagery of lover and beloved became a type of the Sufi mystic's quest for divine love, so that Ibn Arabi, for example, aligns the rose with the beloved's blushing cheek on the one hand and, on the other, with the divine names and attributes.[12]

Other well-known examples of rose symbolism in Sufism include;

The Sufi master Jilani is known as "the Rose of Baghdad" and his order, the Qadiriyya, uses the rose as its symbol.

North Dakota - The wild prairie rose was adopted as the official state flower of North Dakota in 1907. The colors of the rose (green and pink) had previously been adopted by the first graduating class of the University of North Dakota in 1889.[22]